The role of mapmaking in the construction of Mexican national identity

Antonio García Cubas’s Carta general of 1857, the first published map of the independent Mexican nation-state, represented the country’s geographic coordinates in precise detail. The respected geographer and cartographer made mapping Mexico his life’s work. Combining insights from the history of cartography and visual culture studies, Magali M. Carrera explains how García Cubas fabricated credible and inspiring nationalist visual narratives for a rising sovereign nation by linking old and new visual strategies.

From the sixteenth century until the early nineteenth, Europeans had envisioned New Spain (colonial Mexico) in texts, maps, and other images. In the first decades of the 1800s, ideas about Mexican, rather than Spanish, national character and identity began to cohere in written and illustrated narratives produced by foreign travelers. During the nineteenth century, technologies and processes of visual reproduction expanded to include lithography, daguerreotype, and photography. New methods of display—such as albums, museums, exhibitions, and world fairs—signaled new ideas about spectatorship. García Cubas participated in this emerging visual culture as he reconfigured geographic and cultural imagery culled from previous mapping practices and travel writing. In works such as the Atlas geográfico (1858) and the Atlas pintoresco é historico (1885), he presented independent Mexico to Mexican citizens and the world.

"“The newly independent nations of Latin America imagined themselves in ways that linked specific pasts to new, national identities. While each emerging nation-state did this slightly differently, Magali Carrera shows that Mexican intellectuals did this by visually constructing—mapping, drawing, photographing, exhibiting and even performing— idealized narratives of Mexican history and geography that defined what it meant to be Mexican. And, Carrera does this in a well-written and visually profuse book that should interest Latin Americanist geographers working with questions of visual culture, national identity, or cartographic intention.”" - Journal of Latin American History

"“Traveling from New Spain to Mexico is a thoughtful and richly detailed book that seeks to illuminate ‘the complex and diverse spatial practices through which Mexico came to locate and define its national space’ (p. xiv). The book certainly achieves this goal…. This book will be important for historical geographers because it amplifies our understanding of how a distinctive visual culture emerges within the dynamic social contexts of a newly-independent nation. Although the book focuses on the Mexican case, Carrera’s methodology can be applied to other newly-independent countries, thereby expanding its potential readership wider than the title suggests…. Theoretically grounded in critical cartography, rich in historical detail, and laced throughout with over 90 illustrations, this is not light reading. Expect to spend some time with this sophisticated and delightful book.”" - Journal of Historical Geography

"“Traveling from New Spain to Mexico is well researched and documented in primary and secondary sources…. Carrera’s clear and jargon-free writing makes the book enjoyable to read, and the abundant, well-chosen illustrations add to its enjoyment.”" - Hispanic American Historical Review

"“The elegant sweep of visual history within which Carrera places sophisticated readings of the Mexican cartographer’s participation in nation-building discourse is a considerable achievement indeed. The extensively illustrated text and accessible prose will encourage specialist and non-specialist readers alike to get inside the visual narratives created by García Cubas in mapping his many Mexicos.”" - Journal of Latin American Studies